This is a report from inside the classroom, where, on a daily basis, Amoret Abis deals with the practicalities of drawing young people into making music. As a teacher of composition, she must frame the setting of composition tasks and reflect on what kind of craft needs developing and what kind of coaching is needed. As a composer herself, she is fully aware of the anxieties and excitement involved in making your own work, and she argues that all composition teachers should themselves compose. She explores the teaching of creativity in schools, and suggests that it is a vital part of every student’s education.

The Art of Music

Music is an art and must be approached and taught as an art. It is all too easy to treat it as a quasi-science, a branch of historical sociological study, aesthetics or physical education. Music education has a duty to preserve art at its centre, but this makes the teaching task more difficult.

A conflict between art and academicism appears to be both a current and an historic feature of music education. In Music Education in England, John Finney writes about the development of music education in England from the post-war period to the present day, highlighting decades of tension and shifting allegiances between traditional and progressive forces. In John Paynter and Peter Aston’s seminal work Sound and Silence, music teachers were urged to consider that ‘the materials of music are as available for creative exploration as the materials of any other art’. They highlighted a lack of creativity, a lack of artfulness, in the teaching of music, which was made all the more troubling because child-centred and progressive models of education had placed the child as artist centre stage in other Arts subjects. Not just that: it appeared to them that music education was simply not keeping pace with progressive developments in teaching as a whole.

The work of Paynter and others working in the same spirit had, and continues to have, a positive influence on the teaching of music as art, but it is noticeable that music educationalists such as Odam cite problems with academicism many decades after Paynter started to try to resolve them.